I wish Europe had any drinking fountains. Even extremely-high-traffic public areas such as airports and train stations have but a few or (usually) none.
Switzerland has a lot in my experience. At least the few cities that I visited. They are also very well mapped on openstreetmap, so it was easy to search for a nearby one with osmand whenever I was thirsty.
I presume you mean regular small to tiny fountains. Yes very frequent here, my small village has at least 5 of those. Unless there is an explicit sign that its not drinkable all have drinking water.
Good thing indeed, but then you go ie to France where you have sometimes such fountains too, and often reverse applies - don't drink unless its singed as drinkable.
The rule is the same if France though. Water is drinkable by default and will be signed "eau non potable" if it isn't (and even then it usually means it's never tested, not that it's unsafe).
These are not fountains but glorified watercoolers with sparkling water and, sometimes, lemonade. Most of the time they were not free although very cheap: 1 copeck. These survived up to the 1995, several years after the fall. And yes, most glasses have never been stolen.
Shared glasses were quite safe because every machine had special button to clean the glass with pressurized technical water (several calibrated jets) with some chlorine in it. People cleaned the glass with it before pouring soda water.
USSR has been eco/green paradise: no plastic bags or wraps. Meat was wrapped in paper. Milk, butter and sour cream were poured into whatever container buyer had provided. Glass bottles, paper and alike have been routinely recycled mostly by kids as there was small payment for bringing that stuff.
It’s only after the fall of the Soviet Union that shit with plastic poured into. As well with the fall of recycling, morals, etc. (say what you will about hollywood films of the 90s — nothing upstanding about it).
>It’s only after the fall of the Soviet Union that shit with plastic poured into. As well with the fall of recycling, morals, etc.
Soviet Union was green not because of morals, but because it was poor and couldn't afford single use packages. I remember when Nutella entered my country, the empty Nutella jars were washed, kept and used as glasses for drinking - because buying new glasses was hard or expensive.
>And yes, most glasses have never been stolen.
I assume that's only because they were chained and in crowded places. Whole eastern Europe of that time was a thief paradise with casual theft almost completely normalized. (source: I am from Eastern Europe)
Poland here, we still do the thing with Nutella glasses. Not because we can't afford glassware, but rather because why on Earth would you throw away a perfectly good glass?
What GP described might have been first and foremost the signs of a poor society, but then this only gives credence to the whole "decadent rich" line. Single-use plastics are a sign of a lazy and wasteful society.
> the empty Nutella jars were washed, kept and used as glasses for drinking - because buying new glasses was hard or expensive.
I think it's quite common and not especially linked to poverty.
For the smaller containers with a snap on lid only though, because the large Nutella jars with a screw on lid are unsuitable for glasses, but they can contain sauces, paint, screws or nails.
> the empty Nutella jars were washed, kept and used as glasses for drinking - because buying new glasses was hard or expensive.
You do understand that sand is one of the most common things on earth (hence the glass is dirt-cheap).
Just as an example of those mentioned faceted glasses: their price was 7 or 14 copecks (good thing every one of them had the price stamped on the bottom). It’s less than the price of bread.
The only thing I could imagine about those Nutella being used as glasses is common “this is a thing from the coveted west”.
Eco/Green paradise? Plastic isn't the only poison, the USSR was happy to create plenty of industrial poison - Lake Karachay is a great example.
"The former Soviet Union was the world's second largest producer of harmful emissions. Total emissions in the USSR in 1988 were about 79% of the US total. Considering that the Soviet GNP was only some 54% of that of the USA, this means that the Soviet Union generated 1.5 times more pollution than the USA per unit of GNP" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/095937...
And before someone says Lake Karachay is an extreme example because of the nuclear arms race and secrecy: Take the vanishing Aral Sea, the oil and gas leaks, or the "there is no thermostat, just a radiator on 100% and an open window" heating system.
Fresh air and required heat isn't a bad combination. New York City radiator design was very similar after the 1918 flu.
Modern construction with heavy insulation certainly reduces energy use, but at the cost of air quality. Even more modern construction includes air exchangers, but there's a lot of buildings with insufficient airflow.
> there is no thermostat, just a radiator on 100% and an open window
Nothing wrong about it as water temperature in pipes is regulated based on the temperature outside if not at building-level (not uncommon) but at least at heat-station providing hot water to several buildings.
The problem with USSR-style heating infrastructure isn't the heating (apart from unfiltered coal-fired powerplants), but the insulation. Commieblocks were made with almost none, and to this day in most of Russia and former USSR they are bare. It was cheaper to waste coal/gas/oil than to pay for proper insulation and they were built as "temporary solution to housing problem" after all.
When Poland got independent in 1989 and energy prices got real - everybody started buying cheap styrofoam and in a few years we cut our energy usage for heating 3 times. It was CRAZY inefficient because of the pricing of energy vs materials in Warsaw pact.
This "mass styrofoamisation" still haven't happened in Russia to that degree BTW. It's still wasting crazy amounts of energy in all these old commieblocks without insulation.
I wasn’t talking about industrial but your usual Ivan. Just think about how many garbage is produced by a family every day.
As for your article, I don’t have access to the PDF, so I cannot verify it.
The place I grew up sometimes I could see Elbrus even though it is almost 300 km away. That’s for air pollution.
> in the early 1990s the air pollution became an issue of great public attention
This as well may be the coordinated effort to bring down every remnant of Soviet industrial force. You have no idea how many factories have been deliberately bring to their knees and closed down by “effective” new management.
The same way “green” policy is used today for economic warfare (just to think Germany being so stupid as to close their nuclear plants).
If you were standing on top of Mt. Elbrus (elevation: 5.6km above sea level), you could see the horizon roughly 271km away (assuming the horizon was at sea-level, there were no obstructions, atmospheric or otherwise, etc). The inverse of this is that if you were at sea level, 271km away from the peak of Mt. Elbrus, you could theoretically see the peak of the mountain.
So, assuming you weren't at sea-level, it's reasonable that you could see the peak of this mountain from 300km away.
However, seeing the peak of a mountain on the horizon isn't sufficient. You'd need to see a large portion of the mountain on the horizon in order to determine that it's actually the mountain you see in the distance, and not a closer peak that's less tall. This means that the observer would need to be at sufficient altitude themselves in order to view the mountain from this distance. I don't know enough about the math to calculate the necessary altitude required by the observer, but I would estimate an elevation of many hundreds of meters above sea level to be necessary. If anyone else can calculate this better, I would love to know how to find the answer myself.
Without knowing the general area of where you were, all I can say is that it sounds very unlikely.
There have been photos even from Rize, Turkey 300km, albeit very-very blurry.
But I think you are most definitely right: I checked and it’s only 240 from the straight line in my case (my memories of something closer to 290 is more about road distance)
> Meat was wrapped in paper. Milk, butter and sour cream were poured into whatever container buyer had provided.
These were both common in mid-century US too. These practices were slowly discontinued because other packaging was cheaper and more sanitary, especially as foods were packaged further away from the end consumer.
And when buying meat fresh at a butcher in the US, it's still fairly common to get it wrapped in paper.
You can still find places where you can buy stuff "tare" with your own container, but you might have to explain to the clerk what you're wanting to do.
(Basically if using your own container, you put it on the scale, hit "tare" which zeros the scale with the container and then you fill it up. Most bulk sales are via standard plastic containers the store has which are already in the machine's database.)
I'm not sure if "there was not enough of plastic for wrapping, so we recycled newspapers" is an ecological decision. (That reminds me of using newspapers as toilet paper, because there was no toilet paper either... Ah, the days.)
As for glasses, at least in Lithuania those were stolen often. It was common for the machine to have only one glass.
But, of course, maybe it was different in other parts of the union.
Blaming Aral Sea disaster on USSR was/is mostly a PR stunt of post-Soviet Uzbekistan government. The largest part of the drying happened in 1990s and 2000s, because Uzbekistan was farming cotton and wheat in crazy amounts trying to offset massive imports in its new independent economy.
USSR was poor as fuck therefore is saved money on packaging whenever it could. It was occasionally ecologically benefitial as well, but to go from that to "eco/green paradise" is absurd.
USSR was polluting like crazy, significanly more than more developed economies. It treated its citizens as replacable cogs, to the point that after Chernobyl catastrophe it was Sweden not USSR that informed people there was, in fact, a catastrophe.
USSR was denying any problems with asbestos, calling it "asbestos hysteria" of the west. Russia is still doing it to some degree, and russian asbestos mines are causing significant health problems to the people living there. About 60 000 of them.
Soviet heavy industry was ignoring any health, safety and ecology concerns in the name of cost-saving. The reason most "commieblocks" are gray is the air pollution from all that industry and 19th century tech heating with unfiltered coal-fired powerplants.
USSR accidently destroyed Aral Sea. As in - it's no longer there. That's some amazing ecologic paradise.
The only reason Russia isn't the most polluted country in the world is that it's the biggest country in the world by area and very sparsely populated. There's a lot of it to devastate.
> Meat was wrapped in paper. Milk, butter and sour cream were poured into whatever container
This type of arguments are still as annoying as the first time I've heard it. Reusable containers just don't satisfy modern day safety standards.
If they could get away without paying for packaging they will happily do so. They can't because chances of poisoning followed by lawsuits becomes real at scale, causes including not just accidental contamination but also terrorism.
Reusable containers are used at almost ever restaurant in the world that serves on plates.
Reusable containers are currently not cheaper and so they're not used - but the fact that they're not used for non-food items is pretty indicative that it's a cost thing, not a safety thing.
Do you really think what you've posted make sense? Or do they not teach you basic food safety in schools, like finish your food ASAP after removing from heat, heat any cooked food to 84C for 1 minute for sterilization, immediately refrigerate dishes not intended for immediate serving, etc until it gets annoying having to fill in same quizzes every few years?
It really feels strange that this level of basic understanding hasn't permeated across, at least, developed nations. The humanity collectively got as much as 6x mortality variance _among developed countries_ with COVID. It's appalling if things like this had been a contributory factor.
Public toilets too. I just don't understand how all these people are walking around all day without being able to drink or use the toilet. Fair enough if it's acceptable to go behind a bush or something, but apparently it isn't.
In morocco, we have restaurants with sinks near the front, exactly like a sink you might find in a bathroom in a house, and next to that sink is a copper cup attached by a chain to the wall. And people are free to come in and drink from that. I always wondered why the humble fountain wasn't more popular
Maybe the water waste in fountains feels worse in drought-prone regions? Even if the amount is comparably tiny, watching a precious resource just vanish down the drain might be hard to stomach?
I'm basing this on nothing, by the way, but it feels like a fun hypothesis.
In the US, they seem to exist in offices and schools. Airports tend to have them, and often with a bottle filler on the side, which is great since we can't carry water through security.
But, just walking down the street, truly public water? Is that a thing anywhere in the US, or elsewhere?
As others have mentioned, they're very common (in the US) in parks and libraries, but there are also some that are "just there" on the side of the street as part of the sidewalk or path (sure, often near a park but not always).
More and more the newer ones are also "dog watering stations" which is basically a foot-operated drinking fountain with a slow-drain bowl (or just a concrete bowl with no drain).
Even parks that don't have restrooms will often have a fountain.
Neat. That's really what I was asking about. Parks near me usually have a fountain, but only if the park is large enough to have a bathroom with plumbing (as opposed to no bathroom for single ball fields and playgrounds, or a pit toilet for more remote parks). What I don't see often is a truly public drinking fountain that's out in plain view.
Just to throw a few more out there: Hospitals, gyms, walkable food courts/outdoor pedestrian malls, college campuses, stadiums, visitor centers, rail stations, offices, cafeterias, parking garages, movie theaters, car dealers, warehouse stores, some grocery stores... where I live, basically every public space where people are expected to loiter will often have one, usually right by the bathrooms.
Wait, what US cities are you in that do not have public fountains in parks and whatnot?
I'm struggling to think of any parks or high pedestrian areas around me that don't have a public fountain, nor in any of the cities I've lived in. Like, yeah, you're not going to have a fountain out in the middle of a parking lot. But they, to my recollection, seem to be everywhere that people tend to be walking a lot.
As for Europe, they also tend to be in a lot of high pedestrian areas, but really only in southern Europe (Italy, Spain, etc). In northern Europe it seems that everyone is just fine with being constantly dehydrated.
The park across the street doesn't have one.
There are none in the town center (gotta buy Starbucks or similar).
And I don't recall seeing any public ones in downtown DC, other than the Mall and Smithsonian areas.
I already stated they do exist in quasi-public spaces (airports, offices, etc).
Like, if I'm running errands downtown, and I'm not in the tourist zone, there really isn't much without ducking into an office (that might be locked on the weekend).
I've been to Germany, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Spain and France. Only France had a few in touristy beach areas. The total low is Germany, where the whole country has only 1300 (given ~100 cities with >100k ppl, that is just a ridiculous 13 per large city): https://www.bmuv.de/pressemitteilung/staedte-und-gemeinden-m...
Amsterdam Schiphol Airport has drinking fountains at most if not all toilets[0]. There's been a short period recently apparently where they were getting replaced and so were unavailable.
The city of Amsterdam has 500 fountains or bottle filling stations[1]. The rest of the country has at least 2400 more[2].
